With the beginning of fall harvest upon us, I could talk about all the food stuffs coming out of the garden and all the canning and such I've been doing, but NO! This post is all milk and cheese!
I am a slow hand-milker and Cupid is/was an evil creature, so obviously we needed a milk machine. This season I've been using it to milk Frannie and Margo. It really wasn't much of a surprise after using the machine twice a day for about a year and half on multiple animals, it up and died. I've had another milk machine in mind since I knew this was eventually going to happen, but I had hoped for at least a few more months and was not at all prepared for it's demise.
Turns out that Keith was going to get me my new dream milk machine for my birthday, so I just had to order it a little early!
Say hello to the Segel Milking machine!
Why is this awesome? You mean besides that I don't have to hand milk, like I have been doing very, very slowly every morning for the past week? Well, it doesn't have a motor that can die. Instead, it is a wall mounted, vacuum pump, that is super quiet, fast, and efficient. I freaking loved using it this morning! And it will be so easy to train someone to use it when we're out of town-hopefully!
But what to do with all this milk? This summer I've been making A LOT! of Margochego, but making a double batch has proved kind of hilariously difficult. Trying to press multiple cheese molds with a combination of a cutting board and tupperware containers full of change to weight this down is sadly not very effective! But this is!
Yay for birthday cheese press! The inaugural pressing was none other than a triple batch of beautiful Margochego. It started out looking like this:
And ended up looking like this:
Now they are spending the day in a heavy salt brine. I'll wax them and then try not to eat them for the next 4-6 months.
Not eating them is the hard part. We've cut into a few wheels, and damn they are good! I've got a couple dozen or so wheels of Margochego, pecorino romano, Iberico, and beer infused cheeses that I certainly hope will get us through the winter. Margo (the milk sheep) won't be in milk much longer and soon we'll breed her an wait for her to be in milk again next spring. We will still have Frannie in milk, but with only 2 quarts a day from her, there won't be much cheesemaking after October or so.
But we still have both of them in milk now and I've got to get back to a batch of beer cheese!
